Arithmancy
by daisy-chains-and-bow-ties
Summary: This is the tale of a madman with a wand whose ambitions consist of making the perfect cup of instant noodles and trying to understand Arithmancy. His life is simple, daubed with the occasional hiccup,usually in the form of someone's experiment going terribly wrong, necessitating a long letter of complaint from the giant squid due to overcrowding in the lake. But then he meets her.
1. Chapter 1

Chapter 1 - In Which Pluto is Subjected to Strange and Unauthorised Feelings

I'm sitting in Arithmancy, understanding little but loving the numbers, charts and formulas. They fascinate me with their complex simplicity. The professor has her back turned and still the class sit, raptly attentive, scribbling in leather-bound parchment notebooks. They have their textbooks propped, clean as the day they bought them and the inkpot positioned neatly beside them, quills poised, dripping ink onto the parchment as they take in the equations on the board, their tidy minds separating the blur of shapes into meaning. These are the neat people, and they have a careful order about their lives, a cool logic that sets them apart from the students who can't handle this subject.

Me? Well, my book is sprawled, limp, over the desk, its pages crumpled and soiled from careless use. My quill is lying, slippery with ink, feather sodden, spread like disease over the whiteness. My elbow is pushing my inkpot precariously close to the edge of the desk. I'm watching as the chalk moves, making bold strokes on the blackboard, but I don't take notes – I'll write them out later. For months I've been trying to fit the numbers together, but they elude me.

By themselves, they are easy to unravel, but using them to decipher whether or not a spell will be successful depending on the angle of the wave respective of the angle needed to execute the spell optimally while factoring in the complexity of the spell and the skill level of the caster is enough to boggle my disorganised mind. It just won't click. How can numbers bear to translate into something so mundane, so uncoordinated? Are they not beautiful enough on their own?

I am so absorbed I almost don't feel the ball of parchment strike the back of my head, bouncing off and rolling away to rest a few feet behind my table. A boy I have never liked, but whose name I cannot remember, picks it up and nudges the girl at his side, grinning. I pull out my want and point it at him, muttering 'expelliarmus'. It shoots out of his hand and into mine. He glares at me and goes for his wand, but at that moment the professor turns and he shoves the end of stubby ebony want back into his pocket, scowling at me. I flash him a wan smile and turn back to my desk. "Please try and pay attention, Pluto," the Professor says gravely, before returning to his lecture.

I pretend to listen until the gawky man preaching mindlessly to us returns to scribbling out the numbers with flourishes of his wand. It's long, but crooked, like Ebenezer Scrooge's nose in A Christmas Carol. You can tell a lot about a person from their wand. I tear my eyes away from the new set of equations and smoothen out the parchment, peering at the smudged ink.

_Watch your inkpot _

It is artistic writing, unlike my common scrawl, and I know almost instantly who it is. She sits at the very back of the class with her head bent over her book, paying no attention to what the professor says. Her name is Eleanor Hobbiton, and I don't know why I know that, but I do. She has green highlights in her dark blond hair, which hangs in short, spiky strands around her thin face.

Sensing my gaze, she looks up and smiles at me. I turn around quickly and have to stare at the blackboard for several moments to calm myself. Then I look down at the letter again and write beneath her message:

_E = mc__2_

It is the best joke I know.

**I hope you enjoyed that!**

**Reviews are, of course, appreciated :)**


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter Two: The Entirely Unsuccessful Attempt to Procure Advice from Mostly Insane Roommates**

The Ravenclaw common room is stuck somewhere between obsessive orderliness and the musty den of a madman. Various apparatus in varying states of almost about to explode and cover everyone Draught of Exofusion are sprawled over those tables not buried beneath approximately half the Ravenclaw tower private library, supplied and run by its students.

Birds cawed in the rafters; their excrement disappearing in a poof as it hit the barrier conjured to save the plush blue carpet.

I arrive with a pot of instant noodles in one hand and a tremendous collection of books supported by the other. Several stringent evaluations are directed my way before I am deemed not to be another Slytherin trying to filch books from our library.

I climb the stairs to my dorm room and nudge the door open with my bare toe, a habit that annoys my fellow students to no end. They once went to the trouble of setting mouse traps around the door, which resulted in a broken toe and a week hobbling around the castle on crutches which seemed to have a malignant personality, resulting in many unwary collisions with walls. I dumped my evening's allowance of books onto my bed and placed the empty carton of noodles on the windowsill. I glanced out of the window down at the steadily darkening ground. Rubeus Hagrid's old hut stood still and silent beside the Forbidden Forest.

I looked around at the empty room, the brimming bookcases whose polished wood is pockmarked with pictures, tally marks, burns and great gouges.

My books are piled on my bedside, dog-eared and ink-stained from the two months I've had them, since I began my third year at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.

Sky-blue curtains hang around the four poster beds the school is famous for, obscuring the etched calculations, quotes and formulae from dozens of insomniac geniuses. My trunk lies open at the foot of my bed, brimming with more books and wayward socks.

Fondly, I run my fingers down the blackened and bleached sides of my schoolbooks, among them Advanced Potion Making (including annotations by Professor Severus Snape) by Libatus Borage, An Elementary Guide to Ancient Number Systems by Lionel Hypotenuse, Alchemical Experiments by Darwin Bang, my battered copy of Revealing The Unseen and a wealth tomes I am charged with lugging around on a daily basis.

The door bangs open, knocking the complete works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle from a dark mahogany bookshelf, "Hey Pluto, have you seen my crystal phials because Devin has been trying to convince me that glass phials hold the liquid perfectly but you know how I am about my potions' equilibrium while suspended and I wondered… Are you okay?"

I turn, glassy eyed, to regard him, and he shakes his head in disbelief. He's a sandy-haired, bespectacled boy, the quintessential Ravenclaw, balancing adeptly between logic and madness. His name is Indie, due to an unfortunate parental obsession with a certain fictional archaeologist. He frowns at me, "This had better not be about Arithmancy again. You get full marks on every single test you take, so I'm almost 100 per cent certain that you understand what you're doing."

"It's not about Arithmancy," I say defensively.

He looks surprised, "Oh."

I reconsider, "Well, it is actually, but," I add before he can Hulk out on me, "it's not so much about the subject as the… student body."

"A girl," Indie concludes immediately.

I nod and he grins widely, "Well that's nice, for a change, to be obsessed with the things that normal human beings consider to be important," he claps me feebly on the shoulder as he makes for his bed, "Congratulations on being normal."

I stare after him, "Aren't you going to offer me advice?"

He falls down onto his bed and shakes his head, "Not my division, sorry."

I scowl at him and retrieve the fallen collector's box set, occupying myself with attempting to figure out where it could possibly have resided before it fell. Eventually I throw it up on top, hoping that it will find purchase somewhere among the loose theses we fling up there after we finish criticising every line.

I shove the pile of books off my mattress and flop down on top of the sheets, staring at the calculations above my head, a flawless expression for the rise in sentient machinery in the near Muggle future.

I close my eyes and listen to my heart beating, slightly out of tempo, and I swear I can hear my thoughts swirling like a cauldron of poorly mixed ingredients. I noticed her several hours ago, yet beneath the smokescreen of my monotonous observations, I've been able to think of nothing but her. It's becoming an infuriating, stereotypical teenage boy narrative, but I can't seem to make it stop.

"Ugh, kill me now," I say.

"NASA already did that," Indie recites the old quip from across the room. I fling my copy of 1000 Magical Herbs and Fungi at him, which he dodges effortlessly as he sits rummaging through his trunk, spraying socks in all directions.

"I hate you," I tell him.

He nods unconcernedly, "What do I care about the contempt of a non-planet?"

I turn over and reach for the first in my reading list, a six hundred page study of the implications of practical Arithmancy on the traditional Seeing form of Divination. It was a book that our Divination Professor has been trying to find and destroy for years, but an attack on the Hogwarts Library is ill-advised.

She's already had to stumble through the school weighted down by cookery books which saw fit to latch themselves to every available inch of flesh it could identify. Since then she's attempted to waylay students loaning it.

I admit to myself that, once again, I'm attempting to ignore the broad scope of my thoughts. Eleanor, who ignored me completely after class, though that may have had something to do with me purposefully smashing my inkpot, much to her amusement.

I read until Indie threatens to put laxative in my food if I don't stop casting Lumos every ten seconds.


End file.
